Everything’s up and off the walls… Down to bare plaster and bare concrete flooring.

The wife isn’t too keen on heating pipes being visible, but they need to drop from the loft somehow!
Options include channeling into the floor, or boxing in drops from above and ‘hiding pipes‘ behind the skirting…

I’m fearful of pipes being set back into the concrete, in case they leak..

WWSTWD?

DrP

WWSTWD

Light the woodstove and not suffer these modern conundrums.

Whatever you do, don’t restrict the expansion/shrinking of the pipes as they heat up, otherwise your central heating will end up noisy with lots of ‘pinging’ and ‘clunking’ noises. I think embedding in walls/floors is possible (you’d need a chasing tool) but you might need to convert to plastic push-fit piping first, just over that section.

IIRC, there are issues with copper pipes and concrete?

Make a feature of them

A house we went to look at had got a perfectly formed series of mirror-polished copper pipes going up through the hall ceiling and into one of the bedrooms

No need for a radiator the heat from the pipes was enough to heat the rooms. Allegedly

you can get copper pipes with a coating to protect against the plaster, but as said plastic are pretty common now and its how most newbuild underfloor heating is done now.

Have you looked at underfloor heating? no pesky rads

Warm Board

it wont be as good as a proper dig down, insulate and pour a screed, and yes you would lose some heat into the ground, but the ground would also warm up and give you a thermal mass.

IIRC, there are issues with copper pipes and concrete?

Only that the acidity in the concrete will eat through the copper. Other than that it’s fine.

baton the wall out, dry line and run the 15mm pipes behind that, you only loose 20mm of room space and have the option to stick insulation behind the dry lining too (batons can then obviously be thicker for more insulation). Or just box in a corner of a room.

For the horizontal runs, run the pipes behind the skirting – just don’t plaster board as far down as normal and leave a space for them.

Copper pipes and concrete don’t mix as they will corrode and you’ll get tiny holes in the pipes.

baton the wall out, dry line and run the 15mm pipes behind that

along with all your Cat6, I mean you are going network the whole house at the same time aren’t you? This is STW after all 🙂

Why bury the heat?

You’re paying to get warm water to the rads via the pipe work. As said already, they are mini radiators, expose them!

Concrete is alkaline, not acid. I think. And the corrosion happens to cold pipes that attract moisture, which gets alkaline and attacks the copper. I think.

Doesn’t just happen to cold copper pipes carrying water. The complete có1k-jangling 4ukwit who previously owned our house buried the gas feeds to the two (illegally fitted) flame effect gas fires in the concrete under the house. Both had to be ripped up as they had started to corrode.